I'm saying both that I wouldn't expect Buzzfeed to have much in the way of journalistic ethics, and that brief opinion pieces on ad campaigns and board games are not journalism. It's not censorship when respectable publications won't publish a few hundred words and animated GIFs on "Why Monopoly Is The Worst Game In The World, And What You Should Play Instead" in the first place, so I'm not seeing it as particularly terrible if a more permissive editor takes it down after a complaint on the basis there's really no upside to keeping it.

I think it's a pretty open secret that the comparable brief lightweight pieces and listicles on fashion, travel etc. that appear in the supplement sections of even respectable publications are heavily influenced by who the fashion columnist had lunch with and what freebies they've been given, and nobody really cares.

We start worrying about chilling effects on free speech when they cheerfully ignore major scandals involving high street banks because that high street bank is attaching strings to their money.